Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

No one wrote anything down. That wasn’t because instruction in the days of the Kaunian Empire had been oral, though it had. But if there were no papers, the Algarvians would have a harder time proving the men at Kugu’s house were learning what the occupiers did not want learned. Talsu’s memory, exercised as it had never been before, had put on more muscles than he’d known it could. He’d also noticed he was speaking better, more educated-sounding, Jelgavan than he had before. Learning classical Kaunian gave him the foundation in the grammar of the modern language he’d never had.

At last, Kugu lapsed into Jelgavan: “That will do for this evening, my friends. My thanks for helping to keep the torch of Kaunianity alive. The more the Algarvians want us to forget, the more we need to remember. Go home safe, and I’ll see you again next week.”

His students, about a dozen all told, drifted out by ones and twos. Talsu contrived to be the last. “Master, may I ask you a question?” he said.

“A point of grammar?” the silversmith asked. “Can it keep till our next session? The hour is not early, and we both have to work in the morning.”

“No, sir, not a point of grammar,” Talsu replied. “Something else. Something where I trust you to know the answer.” He put a little extra stress on the word trust.

Kugu, a sharp fellow, heard that. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, his eyes-a pale gray-blue-widened slightly. He nodded. “Say on.” Sometimes, even when speaking Jelgavan, he contrived to sound as if he were using the old language.

Taking a deep breath, Talsu plunged: “I trust you, sir, where I wouldn’t trust any of the other scholars here. You’re no fool; you know what the Algarvians are like.” Kugu nodded again, but said nothing more. Talsu went on, “I wish I knew some kind of way I could hit back at them-I mean, not by myself, but one of a bunch of people working together. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Aye, I know what you’re saying,” the silversmith answered slowly. “What I don’t know is how far to trust you, if at all. These are dangerous times. Even if I knew something, you might be trying to learn it to betray me to the redheaded barbarians, not to strike at them.”

Talsu yanked up his tunic and showed Kugu the long, fresh scar on his flank. “An Algarvian knife did this to me, sir. By the powers above, I have no reason to love Mezentio’s men: no reason to love them, and plenty of reasons to hate them.”

Kugu rubbed his chin. He wore a little goatee, so pale as to be almost invisible in some light. He sighed. “You are not the first to approach me, you know. Whenever someone does, I always wonder if I am sowing the seeds of my own downfall. But, now that you bring it to my mind, I remember hearing of what you suffered, and how unjustly, at that Algarvian’s hands. If anyone may be relied upon, I believe you to be that man.”

“Sir,” Talsu said earnestly, “I would lay down my life to see Jelgava free of the invaders.”

“No.” Kugu shook his head. “The idea is to make the Algarvians lay down theirs.” At that, Talsu grinned ferociously. Eyeing him, the silversmith smiled a thin smile of his own. “Do you know the street where the arch from the days of the Kaunian Empire once stood?”

“I had better. I was there when the Algarvians wrecked the arch,” Talsu answered.

“All right. Good. On that street, half a dozen houses past where the arch used to be-going out from the town square, I mean-is a deserted house with two dormers,” Kugu said. “Come there night after next, about two hours after sunset. Come alone, and tell no one where you are going or why. Knock three times, then once, then twice. Then do what I or the other men waiting inside tell you to do. Have you got all that?”

“Night after next. Two hours past sunset. Don’t blab. Knock three, one, two. Follow orders.” Talsu reached out and pumped the silversmith’s hand. “I can do all that, sir. Thank you so much for giving me the chance!”

“You’ve earned it. You deserve it,” Kugu answered. “Now go back to your own home, and don’t let the constables nab you on the way.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Talsu said. “I can slide around those buggers.”

Slide around them he did. He was very full of himself the next two days, but he was often full of himself when he came back from his lessons in classical Kaunian. He wanted to tell Gailisa where he would be going, what he would be doing, but he remembered Kugu’s warning and held his peace.

On the appointed night, he said, “I have to go out for a bit. I should be back before too long, though.”

“A likely story.” Gailisa winked. “If you come back reeking of wine, you can sleep on the floor.” The kiss she gave him suggested what he’d be missing if he were rash enough to stagger home drunk.

Thoughts of what he didn’t intend to miss made him extra careful to dodge patrolling Jelgavan constables. He had no trouble finding the house Kugu had named; its whitewashed front made it seem to glow in the dark. No light showed in either of the dormers. Talsu knocked. Three. Pause. One. Pause. Two.

The door opened. Starlight gleamed off the lenses of Kugu’s spectacles. He carried no lamp, nor even a candle. “Good,” he said. “You are punctual. Come with me.” He turned and started into the pitch-black interior of the house. Over his shoulder, he added, “Close the door behind you. We don’t want to let anyone know this building is in use.”

Talsu obeyed. As he shut the door, he felt rather than hearing someone moving toward him. He started to whirl, but something smacked into the side of his head. He saw a brief burst of light, though there was no true light to see. Then darkness more profound than any in the dark, dark house washed over him and swept him away.

When he woke, pain and nausea filled him. He needed a while to realize not all the rattling and shaking were inside his battered head; he lay in a wagon clattering along over cobbles. He tried to sit, and discovered his hands and feet were tied.

Someone slipped the hood off a lantern. That little beam pierced him worse than the fiercest sun after the nastiest hangover he’d ever had. “Kugu?” he croaked.

Laughter answered him. The fellow holding the lantern said, “No, the silversmith is trolling for more foolish fire-eaters. You deal with us now.” He spoke Jelgavan with an Algarvian accent. Partly from the anguish of the betrayal that implied, partly from physical misery, Talsu heaved up his guts. His Algarvian captor let him lie in it.

As the reindeer-drawn sleighs carried Pekka and her comrades through a stretch of southeastern Kuusamo where no ley lines ran, she began to grasp how little of her own homeland she’d seen. Sitting beside her in the sleigh, both of them bundled beneath thick fur robes, Fernao might have magicked that thought right out of her head. In classical Kaunian, he said, “This might almost be southern Unkerlant, or even the land of the Ice People.”

“I do not know those places,” she answered, also in Kaunian. “And until now, I did not know the district of Naantali, either.” She stuck a mittened hand out from under the furs for a moment to wave.

“On a map, this is nothing but a blank spot,” Fernao said.

“Of course,” Pekka said. “That is why we are here, after all… wherever exactly here might be.”

One stretch of low, rolling, snow-covered hills looked much like another. Here, not even the forests of pine and spruce and larch and fir that clothed the hills around Kajaani could survive. She shook her head. No, that wasn’t quite true, as she’d seen at a recent stop. But the trees on these hills weren’t trees at all, but bushes, stunted things the eternal cold and wind would not suffer to grow above the height of a man.